China insists it 'did not conceal the truth' about SARS / As government begins spin, hope for reform dims

Philip P. Pan, Washington Post

Published 4:00 am, Saturday, May 31, 2003

2003-05-31 04:00:00 PDT Beijing -- The Chinese government on Friday offered a sanitized version of its response to the SARS epidemic, denying it tried to hide the outbreak, refusing to praise the doctor who exposed the coverup and asserting that it had warned the world about the virus in early February.

The remarks, made by a top health official during a news conference broadcast live on national television, appeared to dampen hopes for political reform raised last month when the government fired two senior officials said to have suppressed information about the epidemic.

"The Chinese government did not conceal the truth," said Gao Qiang, the No. 2 official at the Health Ministry, holding up the Feb. 12 issue of the party's flagship newspaper, the People's Daily, as evidence China had been open about the disease.

"Such publicity was first a warning for China itself, and also a warning for the rest of the world," he said, referring to a brief article that reported an outbreak of an atypical pneumonia in southern Guangdong province, where SARS is believed to have originated.

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The article said that 305 people had been infected and that five had died but emphasized there was "no need for panic," the situation was "already basically stable" and a widespread outbreak of the disease would not occur. China's propaganda authorities banned all reporting about the disease soon after more alarming articles appeared.

The government then continued to minimize the outbreak as it spread from Guangdong to other parts of China, and to Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, Canada and more than a dozen other countries. It was only on April 20, more than a month after the World Health Organization issued a global alert about SARS, that China's top leaders changed course, firing the health minister and the mayor of Beijing, pledging accurate statistics and launching a nationwide campaign to fight the epidemic.

There has been a marked decrease in reported new cases following those measures, which included strict quarantines, travel restrictions and a village- by-village, building-by-building effort to monitor residents for fevers. In early May, China reported an average of 151 new cases every day, but the average has fallen to about 14 new cases per day over the past week and a half,

The government reported seven new cases Friday, and one more death. A total of 5,328 cases of SARS, severe acute respiratory syndrome, have been reported in China, with 328 deaths; another 1,042 patients are hospitalized as suspected cases. Worldwide, more than 8,300 people have been infected with SARS, and 754 have died.

China's change in strategy came after a retired military doctor, Jiang Yanyong, accused the government of covering up the extent of the epidemic, telling reporters on April 9 that more than 100 SARS patients were being treated in a few military hospitals in Beijing alone. The health minister at the time, Zhang Wenkang, had claimed that there were only 12 cases in Beijing and that the disease was under "effective control."

The decision to fire Zhang and the Beijing mayor, Meng Xuenong, instead of punishing Jiang, raised expectations among many Chinese who believed the new generation of leaders that took power in March, led by President Hu Jintao, might use the crisis to promote more openness and accountability in government.

But asked Friday what lessons China had learned from its mishandling of the outbreak, Gao defended the fallen minister at length, saying he had not deliberately concealed the truth. "It is just that because of a lack of an effective information collection system, it was difficult for us to lay our hands on the exact figures," he said.

He said Zhang as health minister was ultimately responsible for "the problems in the health area," but he also went out of his way to pay tribute to him, saying he recently visited him and had a "deep conversation" about how to strengthen China's public health system. He said Zhang "gave us a lot of good advice" and volunteered "his more than four decades of experience in health issues in China."

By contrast, when asked his opinion of Jiang, the 72-year-old whistle- blower considered a hero by many Chinese, Gao said he did not know why so many people were interested in him.

"In this battle, I feel very strongly that the strength of the people is inexhaustible, but the strength of the individual is quite limited," he said. "We have 6 million doctors and health care workers, and Jiang Yanyong is one of them."

The WHO, meanwhile, said Friday that it would remove Singapore from the list of countries affected by the virus.

The U.N. health agency said 20 days had passed since the last locally acquired case was placed in isolation. The 20-day period is twice the maximum incubation period for SARS and is a reliable indication that a chain of transmission has been broken.